35 pages • 1 hour read
Michael FraynCopenhagen
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Precarious Friendships
The play examines the moment when a previously strong friendship was rendered untenable. In 1941 Heisenberg visits Bohr and, after a quiet talk, Bohr is so angered that they are never able to repair their relationship. Indeed, the meeting that takes place in the play is only possible once all three characters are dead; only death allows them to critically reexamine the moment when their friendship could no longer endure.
There are many examples of how the friendship between Bohr and Heisenberg is tested throughout the play. The very fact that a German scientist under Gestapo supervision is visiting a half-Jewish scientist in an occupied country raises suspicion. Bohr and Margrethe discuss the difficult position Heisenberg has put them in: They will be viewed suspiciously by the SS and treated as collaborators by their fellow Danes. Simply by visiting the house, Heisenberg is endangering the friendship and testing the boundaries of what it can endure.
He finds the limits of this endurance during the private meeting between the two men, when he asks Bohr whether physicists have “the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy” (25). The question has so much subtext that it infuriates Bohr, who cuts their meeting short. Bohr believes that this is Heisenberg seeking permission to work on a Nazi atomic energy project; Heisenberg disagrees with this interpretation but has no time to explain himself. In that moment, their friendship is irreversibly changed. Heisenberg will visit again, but he will never be treated to the same warmth and welcome that he experienced previously.
Thus, the irony of the situation—and the entire premise of the play—is that a friendship is broken by a misunderstanding. Emotions run too high, and neither man can adequately explain his misgivings. They both lose the value of the friendship. Only once they are dead can they return to the matter. Then, they focus on the question of why, obsessing over how such an enduring friendship could be brought to such an abrupt end.
Duty Versus Morality
If the disagreement between the two men is what prompts the post-mortem reexamination of what transpired in Copenhagen, then the question of duty versus morality informs both men’s mental state at the time. Their situation was somewhat unique: Niels Bohr, the internationally renowned “pope” of modern physics, was being visited by his former assistant during wartime, at a moment when Bohr’s country was occupied by Heisenberg’s country, which was run by a regime that was systematically targeting and attacking people of Bohr’s ethnicity. As a half-Jewish Dane, Bohr had every reason to hate Heisenberg; as a former mentor and an adoptive father, Bohr had every reason to love him too. Thus, they each question how their duty intersected with their morality.
At first this seems like an easier conundrum for Bohr. He refused to take part in the Nazi’s projects and thus kept his hands clean of any moral stains resulting from involvement with the Third Reich. But, as becomes apparent later in the play, he was involved with America’s development of the atomic bomb. He was part of a project that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of people. Neither Margrethe nor Heisenberg blame Bohr for this, but it still occupies his thoughts. But this takes place after the meeting in 1941, thus resulting in an ironic twist: Bohr was so furious about Heisenberg’s apparent immorality that he fled to America and became involved in exactly the kind of project that caused him to become angry at Heisenberg. Examining this from beyond the grave, Bohr clearly has regrets and—for a man obsessed with paradoxes—is still trying to understand how his morality intersected with his duty and adherence to a strict moral code. Bohr’s conundrum remains unanswered, but he is treated kindly by history.
Heisenberg faces a different problem. Throughout the play, he reiterates his love for his country. He is a proud German who wants to ensure that his fellow Germans do not suffer. But the regime in charge of the country disgusts him. He wonders whether he has a duty to work on an atomic project not only to protect his fellow citizens but to advance science. Heisenberg chooses to work on the project and, in the end, he achieves nothing. He does his duty to his country and makes the moral choice but suffers greatly as a result. Fellow scientists will not shake his hand, and his relationship with Bohr is destroyed. Though Heisenberg’s actions seem to conform to both duty and morality, he suffers far more than Bohr.
Reality Versus Fiction
By its very structure, the play explores the tension between reality and fiction. The text presents three real people as characters on a stage and asks complicated questions about their lives without having the people themselves present. Thus, it is a heightened and fictionalized version of reality in which the characters have a constant, evident conflict between what is known, verifiable fact and what is imagined fiction. With this in mind, the play depends upon the audience’s preexisting knowledge of the events described in the text. The intersection of reality versus fiction means that the play can expect the audience to understand that the German atomic project did not result in an atomic bomb being dropped—and that the American equivalent did. The real-life figures and their historical roles inform their characters, adding weight and meaning to their actions and justifying their constant search for the truth about a seemingly forgotten moment in history.
It is appropriate, then, that the characters arrive on stage after their deaths. This is a subtle maneuver by the play, which can now position the events depicted not as a retelling of facts as they were but as a postmodern interrogate of the facts as they might have been. There are numerous competing narratives imposed onto historical events and, by the time the play ends, it’s clear that the play is not concerned with reaching a single, definitive truth. Instead, everything is true. Whether Heisenberg was hoping for Bohr to stop him or give him permission, whether Heisenberg was bragging to his former mentor or attempting to warn his close friends of what was to come—the truth does not matter. What matters is the uncertainty that is brought to the forefront. The uncertain nature of reality creates a juxtaposition with the portrayed nature of fiction; the audience has watched the characters explain their past in numerous ways, and these explanations are pointedly not the real version of events. The audience is explicitly told that no one can be certain of why Heisenberg visited Copenhagen in 1941, and they are told that this does not matter. Instead, what matters—and what gives the play’s denouement its catharsis—is the understanding that by examining the past, the characters come to terms with the realities of their existence. Their fiction becomes their reality, even if it is not necessarily true.
